I very much liked the FreeBSD "ports" system, and was successful in putting up several small servers. But making a graphical desktop out of FBSD was something of a chore at the time, and I can't say that I ever warmed up to fvwm much.

A friend suggested Linux, and since we had an extensive NetWare installation at work, I bought and installed a copy of Caldera OpenLinux (Caldera had NetWare Core Protocol support). I became familiar with the newfangled KDE that was delivered with Caldera, and liked what I saw. Then we got rid of NetWare, and I looked for something that was easier to keep up-to-date.

I remembered how much I liked the FBSD ports system, and decided to give Debian a tumble. I was attracted to the DFSG, and prefer the GPL license to the BSD license. Moreover, GNOME was getting some traction due to squabbling over the QT license (which was not free at the time), so I went wholly hippie, dumped KDE, and went to an early GNOME -- definitely a step backward in functionality but I felt good about myself. Debian itself was an improvement over COL, and I appreciated being able to keep relatively current in incremental steps. But dselect was, shall we say, user-antagonistic and I began to become frustrated with it. I never did get sound running on that system, and when I somehow managed to b0rk Debian's housekeeping database I decided to see what else was out there.

I downloaded Mandrake, burned a CD and then dropped it in the cup-holder. The graphical installer was easy-Margie, and after an hour or so I ended up with a well-integrated desktop and (to my great surprise) working sound! I was impressed, and spent a hundred bucks or so on a box set.

After a few months Mandrake started to show its shortcomings. It had a graphical updater, which downloaded new packages from the 'net, and which purported to handle RPM dependencies. But truthfully, it didn't handle those dependencies well and it was frequently necessary for you to do your own homework if you wanted to upgrade a package. You couldn't upgrade between Mandrake versions either -- you had to reinstall. I followed them through two version upgrades and it wasn't pretty.

Sometime in that period I put up the Ximian (nee "Helix Code") GNOME desktop. That gave me the nicely themed, current desktop that I'd always wanted, and also came with the Ximian Red Carpet update service. Red Carpet was a breath of fresh air, an easy-to-use network based updater with dependency handling that really worked. No more RPM dependency hell!

Mandrake 9.0 was a little unstable for me at home, so I flirted with RH for a few months on my desktop at work. The RH installation procedure was even prettier and easier than Mandrake's was, and it was also briefly supported by Ximian. I never had a chance to warm up to Red Hat (or give them money), because they decided to split the product line into RHEL and Fedora parts. I couldn't afford RHEL, and Fedora sounded to me like it was going to be an unstable and unsupported mess -- complete with the RPM dependency problems that we all love to hate.

Thus began my foray into Gentoo-land. I was attracted to the idea of compiling the system from source and wanted to see if Portage was all that. I bopped over to one of the Gentoo mirror sites and noticed an unadvertised 2004.1 ISO image was there. Checked more mirrors and found that some of them had the 2004.1 release and some didn't. Cool! I've stumbled onto a release in progress. Better download it now before the slashdotters discover it. Bad plan: that release was b0rken, and the installation CDs had problems recognizing some common ethernet cards (including my own). I backed off to the 2004.0 ISO and reran the installation regimen, but foolishly selected the 2.6 kernel despite it's having been marked "experimental". The init scripts subsequently failed because they required devfs (menuconfig had specific advice that devfs was obsolete and shouldn't be selected). Aargh! I threw in the towel.

Four months later Gentoo released the 2004.2 ISOs and I took another shot at it. This time I decided to forego the installation CD, and chrooted under an existing Mandrake. "In for a dime, in for a dollar" I reasoned, and proceeded to do a stage 1 install. It took me a solid week of compiling to have a fully-functional desktop (OpenOffice itself took 49 HOURS to compile on that anemic 350-MHz Pentium-II machine). But the doggone thing *worked* this time.

And you know what? It worked really well. I was particularly impressed by the improved performance of mplayer -- no more skipped frames. The desktop was noticeably more responsive than the Mandrake system that it replaced. The code was more current than the code supplied by either Mandrake or RH, and it was compiled to my specification.

I've stuck with Gentoo for these two years, and I've no reason to switch. I've never had to reinstall my home machine -- all that reinstall nonsense with each new "version" is gone. I've converted an OpenBSD server for a nonprofit I help run to Gentoo, and my work desktop is Gentoo. All three machines have radically different missions and footprints, yet Gentoo adapts to each of these with grace.

Sorry this has been long-winded. To summarize what I like about Gentoo:

Portage rocks. We still have dependency issues from time to time, but nothing like the problems I've seen in RPM-based systems. The devs work hard to keep the tree current.

Gentoo allows me to compile-out bloat (um, "features"), which has a cumulative effect on performance. For example, I consider spell-checkers to be bloat. I dislike emacs' support for X -- so I compile it out and don't have to deal with it anymore whenever emacs runs in an xterm. My ISP doesn't support IPv6 -- so why should I? USE="-ipv6" takes care of that.

Gentoo can be what you want it to be. It can be a stripped-down single purpose server. It can be a loaded home desktop with multimedia capabilities. It can be a business desktop, or anything in-between. You decide!

The Gentoo community is helpful and friendly, and the documentation is first-rate.

(And though you didn't ask, let me implore: Don't dumb Gentoo down! Gentoo does require some amount of hand-holding, but it's all about that "choice" theme that we keep hammering on. Making Gentoo idiot-proof means reducing the choices that we have; better to send the idiots elsewhere. When they're ready for Gentoo, they'll come.)

- almost everything is in portage, I can install the ati/nvidia drivers directly without adding some overlays (or install another program like automatix in ubuntu)
- the system just works
- it has a great performance
- it taught me a lot about linux
- the documentation is one of the best,
- I know whats running on my computer

- I never know which options an rpm got and which it has not compiled in.
- Compiling on Binary distros sucks or I am simply too stupid to do it. I never managed to compile something on binary distros with make and make install stuff. Something is always missing or breaking the install. To match then Distro name with package name is simple pain to me. Never had such problems with Gentoo.
- I think Gentoo is natural close to upstrem developers (hope I got the direction right)
- I have an Idea what happens on my System. I loose that Idea as soon as I use i.E. SuSE.
- I hate when Distros do not things at their likeings. i.E. SuSE policies about wine-versioning (they use the old dateformat) is quite crazy. The distro wine is complete useless if you do not want to stick to SuSEs/Novells support (which is does not exist)
- Gentoo reacts a lot faster then other Distros (maybe excluding Ubuntu) in includeing wishes.

- Larry!
-useability of the system is the best aviable for my likings_________________quote from Spaceballs:Dark Helmet:[...] we were told to comb the desert, so we're combing it! [puts down bullhorn] Find anything yet?!
Soldier: Nothing yet, sir.

I use Gentoo because all of the previous reasons stated by everyone, but perhaps it's because of one in particular:

It's the distro I'm extremely used to.

Compare it to an airplane, with Gentoo I can do loops, go right, left, up, down, nosedives, and even if the engine fails, I just know how to fix it, fast, in mid air, just because I know where to find any fix for anything. If I ever need to land, it's just to exchange the engine and go up again. I have trully crashed twice, but that's part of the learning process.

If I try another airplane, it almost always becomes a crash course, even with the most stable distro with auto-pilot. Maybe I, too often, try things that the distro devs don't think normal users should do, it's just my hackish nature. Or maybe I don't have the patience/can't find/can't be bothered to look at the manual to find the way I'm supposed to follow, most of the time I can't find the info I want in a fast and organized manner.

About the crashes, even Debian and Ubuntu don't survive a night with me, they are very sensible to the kinds of upgrades you do(like updating directly from two versions ago), it must be always the same packages with the same variables, whereas Gentoo can take almost any kind of things you can throw at it.

Also, while Gentoo stable isn't as stable as other distros, our testing ~arch QA is much better than their testing archs.

My reasons are similar to rerutals. (Hey, that's two levels of referencing other content now ).

I once switched t Kubuntu and thought "Hey, this works right out of the box, and I don't have to do anything".

But then I wanted an updated amarok, and I managed to kill that poor Kubuntu within a few hours and switched back to gentoo at once, because I now need the freedom gentoo offers me. I'm just used too try new apps, and even though I don't yet know how to fix everything, I can't easily switch off, because I somehow got used to doing things the Gentoo way (or at least something quite similar to it ).

And I expect the gentoo-way to work for other distros, which just befuzzles them to no end

(If there's no word like befuzzle in english, now there is )_________________Being unpolitical means being political without realizing it. - Arne Babenhauserheide ( http://draketo.de )

I like to change stuff too much to be happy with a binary distribution. I try ubuntu and suse for a while when new versions come out, but I tend to come back to Gentoo fairly soon afterwards when a new version of something's come out or I want to try Enlightenment again. Mythtv was stil at 0.18.1 on Ubuntu when I last checked, and Wine on amd64 requires various workarounds.

* it's the linux distro i'm used to (never used another one seriously)
* is's highly customizable a.k.a "All of the sudden, Larry the cow was in control."
* it has a big and up-to-date package repository
* it's an optimal environment for me as programmer, as it is a source based distro
* portage is a very good package manager (allthough it may have it's shortcomings)
* it's "install once - use forever", at least if you don't do something nasty
* documentation is superb
* i like the community
* it's high-performance

I enjoy using Gentoo. It's always an experience. I haven't used another distro seriously since I began using Gentoo, and I honestly don't really want to. Nothing else feels like it fits my needs like Gentoo. I have tried to use FC5, but it always feels extremely awkward.

1) The major apps are always up-to-date (kernel, Mozilla, OO, etc.) Major changes can be dealt with by 'emerge -eav world' and not by installing a new version of a distribution.
2) Access to source code. If I *need* something working *now* I can overlay it, fix it, and file a bug report while waiting for the developers to correct things upstream.
3) Customization via USE flags, config files and even portage overlays on occasion.
4) Visibility to what's happening 'under the hood'.
5) Control, control and control.
6) Good documentation and community support.
7) Portage. It's easy to create your own ebuilds if you don't find one that already exists among the large repository.

I have started using linux from the time I have lan cable modem, its a year ago. Before I try Mandrake, Mepis, but never find such interesting as gentoo.
I have learnt as much things as I didnt know its possible, using gentoo.
And also I sit in front of computer more than ever:(

I hate prepared environments, prepared things, I love make all things as I want._________________Arch & Fluxbox & 2.6.24-rc-zen!!!!
robertek.brevnov.net

~ hated windows because i did everything right and it still *ucked up
~ it was the first distro i understood after suse, mandrake.... i remeber reinstalling mandrake about 15 times on the same day becasue i was not able to install an app or something went wrong etc etc.... with gentoo as my first linux ever i was finally able to install apps that i needed and finally a good linux and not a "click and pray" box of rubbish
~ community! gentoo forums are more usefull than google
~ when something is wrong its 99,99% my own fault
~ portage / USE
~ fluxbox
~ mplayer
~ glftpd
~ amarok
~ i want to think for the sys not the other way round

imho gentoo is the best distro to start with when switching from windows becasue only gentoo showed me so clearly the power of linux and after understandig everything gentoo gets better and better...

* First and For-most the community, its just amazing
* I started using it thinking it was cool
* I stayed with it b/c it taught me more about linux then any other distro out there could
* While teaching, it kept my system up-to-date with security and stuff
* I use it now b/c I know how it ticks. I use it on half a dozen servers and have 0 issues.
* I will continue using it b/c it can be has much as a hobby or as much as a simple OS as you want, You can choose who much you want to piddle with things. Run ~x86 for bleeding edge, run x86 for stability, run a mix and get what you want.

The only other thing that would be kind of nice, but I really havn't had an issue is to have a slower archeticuture, where packages are testing against their other super stable dependencies to make sure things work. But this would be a full time job for several people.

I love Gentoo, and tell people to use it all the time, their is no other Distro out there that will teach a user as much about itself while keeping the user safe._________________GibbonsR.net | OpenLaptops.org

1) Community
-I had one big problem installing Gentoo on my computer. I had several users on the forum working on my problem with me for 2 days before it was finally resolved (2.6.17-r4 doesn't like my SATA chipset)

2) I'm LAZY! (aka portage)
-I had a friend years ago who used Gentoo, and talked about the emerge command a lot, and how easy it was to install and update. Eventually I got so sick of windows, and SuSe / Slackware just weren't something I was willing to put the effort into. I installed Gentoo because of emerge, essentially.
I have no beef with spending a few extra days getting Gentoo up and running (took me 4 or 5 days from start to finish, I believe) in order to have the ability to use it with ease in the future. I'd much rather type emerge -av someapp rather than downloading it, finding out half way through that it needs four other dependencies, tracking them all down, installing them, only to find out THEY need dependencies as well.. Just not my idea of a manageable system.

3) Bleeding edge
I techincally run a stable system, but it's full of ~amd64 packages because I like to try out the absolute latest software, so long as the core of my OS is stable. It's nice to have this option available to me. I can basically set it up any way I like.

4) Fluxbox
I originally was introduced to linux through Knoppix, and thus, KDE. I really liked how it worked, how everything was already part of the environment, and this was great for Knoppix and it's purposes. Now that I run Gentoo, KDE is just too bloated. Too much I don't need/use, plus it has... how shall I say this... too much GUI to begin with.
I like Fluxbox's idea of building everything from scratch. Much like Gentoo's base theory.. Start with little or nothing, and add only what you want. You start with a slit, and nothing more. I don't run any type of support for desktop icons (I hate them...) and it leaves the desktop open to my own choice of system monitors (gDesklets, gkrellm, torsmo, whatever)

Again, this goes back to me being LAZY!
I'd rather put in the work at the beginning to configure fluxbox to my own needs than fight with KDE every day, trying to remove stuff I DON'T want.

and finally
5) Enhanced Stability and Performance over Windows
For anyone who has seen my windows desktop, it's pretty GUI intensive. I can't stand working with the default windows UI, so I added a LOT of programs to change the look and feel to something I was comfortable with (and efficient with). This takes FAR too much effort and processor power on Windows, thus causing my system to temporarily slow down (mouse freezes for 5 seconds or so) every 10 minutes. VERY annoying. Plus the crashes don't help much either.

So that's my post.. same reasons, with a bit of a personal touch behind them._________________...And then stuff happened.

1. Its configurable. I can decide exactly what I do and dont want from the available packages.

2. Support. The level of support in these forums is ace, it really is.

3. I Know Whats Happening On MY System. Between the CFLAGS, USE flags and all the other configuration options, I know exactly whats happening right from the minute I stick the install cd in the drive and power on. I can optimise the build process right from the start, and be confident I know what is being built on my system. Rather than sitting here wondering what some big corporation installs, what they think I do and dont want, using a generic pre-built 'one-size-fits-all' approach.

Essentially because it's not a distro. nobody chooses for me i must use this or that piece of software, nor i am tied to reinstalling my os periodically because updating is in theory possible and even easy, but not really in practice. and, have you ever tried to compile your kernel with mandrake? when i tried gentoo i had, for the first time since i knew about linux, a system which did indeed work. every single bit of it. and 2 years after, just before my hard disk crashed, it was still working, with no bloat at all. i like gentoo because it works. i like it because it empowers me to make it work. and larry, i like it also because of larry_________________The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better." I can't understand why it won't work on my Linux computer.

Well, I wanted to install Gentoo because of the really great splashscreen the live-cd had/has (was 2006.0 at that time). Yes, I am serious. Don't get me wrong, at that time I was used to SuSE 10.0, and I had a lot of issues with hald, dbus and friends and I was looking for a different, more challenging distribution. I tested ArchLinux, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva ... just to name some of them. And well...the Gentoo-live-cd had the most impressive boot-splash!
I had to install it gentoo 4 times (it took me 2 1/2 weeks to get my current installation) because I first made a test installation on a small HD to see how it is. And after two months finally I had the live-cd splash-screen. But then I already had fallen in love with this awesome, dynamic distribution called Gentoo!

And this are the reasons:
- the community is awesome
- hints, how-to's, tip's and trick's everywhere
- I can setup the system to fit MY needs and
- I am able to see what is happening why
- updated software, great maintainers
- no need to reeinstall the system _emerge -e_ and your done
- it is STABLE!!! (as long as I stay on the safe...ähm I mean stable side of life )
- it's easy to understand (after some time)
- it's free like in freedom
- and it's damned fast!!!

My personal reasons:
1) The community. I don't know if this is better than any other community and would be arrogant of me to say it is, but I do know that is a one heck of a community that is supportive and helpful. I have even witnessed users from other distros on here trying to get help. That says a lot. Maybe this community is more geeky? Which is a good thing.

2) I must say the USE flag system. I know it takes ages to compile things and to set them up sometimes, but really, I like the fact that I can disable certain things really easy. Most binary distros have dependencies for software I will never use, so it makes sense to disable that option. It makes the program less bloated and in some cases it increases speed.

3) I can set the Compiler flags I want. I like playing around with the flags to see what can be done, and to learn a little bit about them. I think that there is a more personal touch to the system when you compile it all from scratch. It's just more ... personal. I don't know how to describe it, kinda more connected to it. And before you say it ... I already have a girlfriend

4) I originally came to gentoo because of RPM hell. I had circular dependencies and it was a nightmare to install new things. Also, certain gui tools made by the distro would totally screw up the configuration so badly that the local expert in Linux (a slackware user no surprise there ) would not be able to figure out how to fix it. We were forced to uninstall the app and reinstall it and configure it by hand. The GUI configuration just became useless to me and I learned a lot from him, including how to compile a kernel. Then Gentoo started. This was back in the day when Gentoo was starting up and their very first bootable CD was made. Programs were easy to install, guides were in place to tell me how to configure the software right like samba, so I no longer needed that guru's help anymore. This was back then when all the software in the repository was listed on one long webpage, but we are talking like a 1000 programs if that, so there were no circular dependencies at all. However, I will admit that now there is a whole lot of software in the repository, and the USE flags have become more complex, there are the occasional circular dependency, but it's easy to fix, just track down the one package that causes the circle and change the USE flag, compile just that program with the USE="-foo" emerge bar command, and then emerge -uDN world or whatever it was that you called. Just add that N in there and it will recompile that program with the right useflag and no more circular dependency, will it's still there, but the program is already installed, but it doesn't matter that the other programs are linked to the old one without whatever that USE flag does.

5) I have used gentoo since it's early days and it has just worked. Why switch to a new distro? Admittedly, I have tried others since I started using Gentoo, but I always switched back because I found that KDE runs the fastest out of all the major precompiled distros. That was the one thing. My framerates are just higher and I am a gamer. Framerates are important to me. So, I try to squeeze speed out of my system and Gentoo let's me do that.

So, in conclusion, Gentoo is there, it works, it looks it will be around for years to come and fully supported, so I look forward to the futire and the new technology. Gentoo is one distro that can handle the new technology to it's fullest potential. I know there is an alternative to portage out there and I may try that some time. One thing I can say, the baselayout that Gentoo uses is very well thought out and is easy to configure. It's really nice and better, in my opinion, than most distros out there.